DOS Utilities and Comments

This page was mostly written in the mid to late 1990s, but not changed much because of priorities, not because I gave up DOS. Being too lazy to update this page, and reluctant to dump it as I still get occasional email from a reader who found it with a search, I've simply added a DOS 2005 page with some a few items.

There are no fancy features to this page, only text and connections to other pages and files. Somehow I didn't think any of the bells and whistles would be suitable for a DOS page.

In many ways I prefer DOS to Windows! DOS software is often quicker, more efficient, easier to teach to others (menus have only so many choices), easier to transfer between computers, easier to troubleshoot, and easier to remove. To anybody well practiced in DOS it is also much easier to install programs, once one gets over the hassle of having to worry about the printers with each new program.

In the old DOS days a new computer meant you just copy your directories from your old computer and your programs are running right away.  With Windows one must reinstall everything.  Some people have lost (or never owned) the original source disks.  More than once I've talked to people who didn't know their CD was no good without the magic number that came on a separate piece of paper (usually because somebody else installed the software for them in the first place).

At least with Windows 3.x and 9x pure DOS was always available, not just in a DOS or Command Line window as in Windows NT (and now its successor, Windows 2000).  However, Windows Me which is the more common follow on to Windows 98, tries its damndest to make you think there is no DOS there, and will not let you boot to pure DOS directly without a great deal of effort.  See the Win-Me page entitled Restoring Dos Ability to Windows Millennium or Win-ME DOS for the instructions on how to do this.

Alas, DOS is vanishing, but for some games and utilities. The utilities range from the old and still heavily used to very new such as Partition Magic and System Commander. There are still some DOS based pages on the internet to be found.  Check out Jim Leonard's  all things PC Oldskool web page.

Another nice site is NOTES ON MS-DOS 6.22 + BATCH programming on Win9X and has lots of help on the commands. If no response from the page try again later, for the web server the site is currently on seems to have outages at times -- mostly the times I want to view the site.

Flash, Flash, first update here in many years.  Great site called Dan's 20th. Century Abandonware which features abandonware for not only DOS, but many other operating systems.  Once I get a bit more organized, I intend to mail him some of my old DOS software I have finally abandonded, with manuals yet.

This page is dedicated to some of my favorite DOS utilities, many of which I use on my multi-boot Windows NT 4.0, Windows for Workgroups 3.11, Windows 95, Windows 98 system, and some which get used on the marvelous HP200LX which runs DOS 5.0 from ROM.

All windows 9X users might be interested in two excellent long file name utility programs, both by the same excellent programmer, DOSLFNBK and LFNSORT. Sometimes the latest version of each of these can be found at the ZD Net (search for LFNSORT and/or DOSLFN). Both are shareware, though an older version of DOSLFNBK, version 1.6, remains freeware.

DOSLFNBK can be used to back up all long file names from DOS (even older versions of DOS) so you can back up and restore using 16 bit backup utilities. That means you do not have to install Windows 95 in order to restore. I have fully restored onto new disks using an older version of DOS, then just rebooted into Windows 95. At the time of this writing the latest version (2.2) was available from the author and includes FAT32 support.

LFNSORT can be used to sort directories and files in a Windows 9X system in almost any order. Before Windows 95, one could use the older Norton Utility DS (Directory Sort) in order to sort directories and disks, but it was never upgraded to work with long file names, and probably never will be. At the time of this writing the latest version (1.5) was available from the author. It now includes FAT32 support.


Everybody should have a copy of PKZIP and PKUNZIP (version 2.04g) on their system. It is available at almost every bulletin board and shareware site in the world as PK204G.EXE (a self extracting zip file). You can also get it from the PKWARE® Inc. Home Page. While WINZIP has become a popular favorite, there are still some zipped files it cannot handle at this time -- those that used passwords and those that used authenticity verification (available only to registered users of PKZIP) In addition, to my knowledge, only PKZIP gives you the ability to do everything from the command line and run complex archiving operations from batch files.

PKWare has now come out with PKZIP 2.50 for DOS which has long file name support -- but only when used in a DOS window under Win 95 or 98.

Being out of date, I just found out that PKUNZIP doesn't work properly with Windows XP (or Windows NT) when there are any long file names in the zip file.  The PKUNZIP command unzips the files with the old 8x3 DOS filenames -- not the long names stored in the zip file.  I recommend the ZIP & UNZIP utilities from www.info-zip.org.  This is open source software that has versions for a wide variety of operating systems.  They also have available a graphical front ends for the software if that is your desire.

One of my favorites is Buerg's LIST.COM. Latest version I have is 9.1, also available on internet as list91k.zip.  The referenced link is for a whole page of DOS programs, so once you get there you can scroll or search down to the file (it is alphabetical).   It is a quick simple program for viewing the contents of any file. It is not a viewer in the sense that it will translate formatting marks, it shows you the stored characters. F1 pops up quick menu screen which tells you of what you can do. Some of the quick commands often used are typing W to get word wrap, Alt+H for hex display, super fast searches with \, and many more. I add a copy to all my clients computers for my use, and even added a shortcut to it in my Windows 95 Send To folder so I can bring it up from the Explorer any time I want to see what's in a file. If you want an older version (such as for a palmtop with limited space) check out Garbo's great Old Versions Worth Retaining Page  for list77a.zip and many other nice old programs.

To change dates & times on files Unix lovers have Touch. PC Magazine came out with a TOUCH utility for DOS in 1988 that does just that.  The 3K zip file touch.zip  contains the original 1988 version as well as a newer version, corrected for a Y2K problem, touchpcn.exe, which was emailed to me by Bill Godfrey.

Nice powerful small DOS program (freeware) called HTML Tidy can be used to clean up HTML code.  Here's what the great Lockergnome email newsletter has to say about it: "When editing HTML it's easy to make mistakes. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a simple way to fix these mistakes automatically and tidy up sloppy editing into nicely laid out markup? Dave Raggett's HTML TIDY is a free utility for doing just that. It also works great on the atrociously hard to read markup generated by specialized HTML editors and conversion tools..." NOTE: this is a command line utility, but a Windows front-end is available

Many files nowadays are too big for a single diskette, and most people aren't aware of the very simple slice & splice routines that PC Magazine put out in 1989.  PC magazine posted it for awhile on their pages, moved it, and I finally got tired of trying to fix the broken links to it, so here is a copy of  slice.zip.

Two of the best disk utilities are now freeware for private or educational use.  Neither are for Windows 9x, or a DOS window opened up from Windows!   To use either, you must reboot to DOS!  I used to think it had to be DOS 6.22 or earlier, but have learned from email & tests that both work from a DOS boot of the newer machines (but you may need to use SETVER).    While long file names cannot be seen by DOS, the Disk Imaging program automatically takes care of the long file names, for they are in the image, even though you don't see them from DOS.

 
One of these programs is FDFORMAT, a classic diskette formatting program that can be run in any version of DOS from 3.20 to 6.22. It will allow you to format diskettes in ways you never thought possible, and make them run faster than normally formatted diskettes.

The other program is the disk imager program, DOSDF. This used to be shareware, but the author now gives away the registered version, and no longer updates it. With this program you can make images of disks for storing or e-mailing, and copy unlike disks. It will create self extracting images, so the end user does not need a copy of DOSDF. I used this to copy a 5 1/4 inch 360 K version of DOS 3.1 onto a 3 1/2 inch disk so I could boot a new computer with a very old DOS version.  DOS 3.1 didn't even recognize 3 1/2 inch diskettes!

I found a great program for predicting tides (all over the world) for DOS based systems at SHAREWARE.COM, then it vanished from the site, but after I saved the zip file. It's called TIDES.ZIP (176,542 bytes). Great for anybody who leaves near a coastline and had the slightest interest. While it runs best on a computer with a floating point chip, it does run on my HP200LX (DOS 5, 80186, under 10 MHz). For the palmtop I shrunk the executable file with PKLITE, and deleted all tide files but the one closest to my location.
If all you want is internet e-mail on your HP100LX or HP200LX, then by all means check out Goin' Postal. This marvelous small program is fast and easy to use.  It has the nice ability to check more than one POP e-mail address with one quick dial up connection (it is finished before my desktop machine has even booted up).  I consider this program a must for anybody with the Dos based HP who wants to use it for e-mail. With this program you are able to use prepaid phone cards or regular phone cards to call your ISP long distance to check mail, something rather difficult to do with your desktop! The program became freeware as version 5 relase 1 in 12/00 and was to be made available on S.U.P.E.R., but they blew it!
There was a web page for it at http://gfys.net/gp/, but the domain did not respond last time I checked.  A copy of that freeware version (including documentation), 364kb in size, is here with the name gp5r1.exe.

Want to interconnect two computers, synchronize files, or just plain copy files? You don't need Windows 95 briefcase or even Laptop. A great program called ZIP (no relation to the ZIP in compressed file storage) does that simply, and uses so little space that it is ideal any computers that can run DOS (particularly the HP palmtops). With a name like ZIP there is no way to search for it simply with a browser, but you should always be able to find the latest version at S.U.P.E.R. (Simply Unbeatable Palmtops Essentials Repository) (Dead Link now) . You will also find a wealth of other DOS utilities there.

MSKERMIT is a nice small terminal emulator for DOS. This was (and might still be) public domain software put out by Columbia University and available during the 80s from most BBS systems. The only cost ever mentioned was for source code if you wanted it.

The version here is from 1989, so will run on older computers. The EXE file is 101,923 bytes and the INI file included is 846 bytes, so it fits nicely on a HP200LX. The included INI file was setup for VT100 keypad emulation on a XT I think. Documentation is included. I haven't used it since 1989, so don't ask for assistance.

This page rarely gets updated, but here are a few "newer" listings for 2000.   A number of Unix utilities have DOS ports and often make superb utilities.  My two most commonly used of these are GREP for fantastic and rapid file search capabilities and SED for command line editing.  Both are available at S.U.P.E.R. (Dead Link now)   (though the version of GREP is called XGREP, possibly because of the need -x switch it lets one use).
For the brave who want to play with partitions there is the Ranish partition manager (Dead Link now) and from Terrabtye the free utilities PartInfo and MBRWork as well as the great shareware BOOTIT Next Generation.
The following probably should be called command line utilities instead of DOS, for some will not run when you are booted into DOS:

Command line FTP is built into Windows 9X and doesn't need to be downloaded from anywhere.  Great for automated FTP jobs using batch files.

LAME probably creates the best quality MP3 files, at least from all the posted comparative tests.  It is open source, used on many platforms and it's DLL is built into a lot of other software which creates MP3 files.  Most sites only have the source code so you'll have to hunt a bit for Windows binaries.  Razor Lame is a great Windows GUI for LAME.

If you have a web page and have access to the log files for your web page, you should not be without the open source command line utility Analog to analyze the log files for usage.  To speed up the reverse DNS lookups you will also want the free QDNS.

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